red sun

alchemical gold and the innocent mystery

The sun rose red through the wildfire smoke in the east.

Her bare feet, already dusty and caked with soot and dry mud, kneaded the soft earth in that first beam of sunlight shining through the forest. Back and forth, back and forth, she kneaded the soil, gently rocking from heel to toe over the mound of soft earth, breaking it up, packing it down.

As she moved like that, a quiet dance of devotion, a silent prayer of resilience, she felt eternity enter the space there and she was, again, outside of time. Red sun, bare feet, rocking over the earth mound, back and forth, back and forth.

Beneath her feet and the eerily glowing red streak of morning sunshine, beneath the soil and mulch and compost, beneath her prayer and struggle, lived the seeds she’d gathered from the four corners of the earth. She had filled her basket with creation seeds - Inca corn, Hopi tobacco, Calamus root and Celtic birch; she gathered African sage, okra and rooibos; Welsh dandelion, chamomile. She had gathered in the deserts and valleys, next to the rivers and along coastlines. When the fire comes, she was told, keep life going, keep life going. Take care of the seeds.

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The world was on fire. It had been on fire for a looong time. It was a deep underground fire at first, following rotten root paths through the earth, rising, smoking, engulfing entire cities in a moment’s notice, then disappearing, returning underground again - like the smoldering hunger of mother earth’s bleeding heart.

The inner fire had been burning, quietly and mostly unseen, for decades, until the pressure of pure alchemy had to, finally, manifest. Now the earth’s skin was burning, purifying, transforming.

✧

As she kneaded the soil with her feet, in the rising red and gold smoke-covered sunlight, she knew that time would soon stop again, the way it did all that time ago when the people went underground for generations, kept alive by the compassionate beings who live there.

She wanted to dig, like in the old stories - find a cottonwood tree with roots older than her great great grandparents, and begin digging, deep, deep, deep into that inner under light world that lives beneath these ancient trees of life - she wanted to make a home there, wait out the storms, curl into a nest of roots and soft earth and sleep until the wars of man and the wrath of the earth came to a quiet, final, close and emerge, like in the old stories, covered in dirt like a seed, whitened and softened and raw, to find her mound of creation seeds and again, begin - restoring life on this beautiful innocent earth star, planting the seeds of rivers and buffalo and wild strawberries.

She wanted to dig.

She wanted to savor seeds between her palms. She wanted to knead the earth with her feet and dance in the old way, weaving the world alive with each step, each breath, each thought a prayer manifesting as a wildflower in the meadow. She wanted to dance life alive again, moving starwise with the milky way and turning the heavens with her heart, spinning atomically simple and wise.

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The world illuminated gold that day.

Through the hazy smoke in the east, the golden light tinged the edges of the world red like the tip of a flame.

They say gold is the central manifestation of true alchemy. The kind of gold that doesn’t come easy, from things “going right”. The true gold lives in the center of the dissolution - the center of the chaos and destruction, in the dying of an old way of life, from the pressure of resisting hungry ghosts. And we are here again, personally and planetarily, in the midst of a destruction we can’t even see in its totality because we’ve normalized it, grown numb, forgotten. But it’s here. The fires and floods and the famine. And in the smoky light of worlds on fire, the earth turns gold and seeds are sprouting somewhere deep inside the dark safe womb of the great mother.

Time stops. The birds quiet down. We may all be buried like seeds or purified through light, but there will be a great silencing - a reckoning, an eruption and a true new beginning. Cracking into the new dawn. Barefoot, covered in soot and earth, carrying seeds.

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“Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.” - Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tajore

photo by author

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